Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said Wednesday that he will send in the army to help end a monthlong standoff between Quebec police and armed Mohawk Indians barricaded at two reservations in the province. Mulroney said he hopes, however, that the conflict will be settled peacefully, and he appointed Quebec Superior Court Justice Alan Gold to mediate the bitter land dispute between the Mohawks and the Quebec government. But he did not rule out the use of force.

Charles Rich, 11, was sniffing gasoline with his two brothers in their basement during the summer when he dropped the bag of gas near a candle. His gas-soaked clothes exploded into flames. Fumes from his breath ignited, and the fire screamed down his throat to his lungs. He burned to death in front of his brothers. That should have been enough to scare anyone straight. But brothers Carl, 11, and Phillip, 13, still sniff gas.

Pope John Paul II will make a one-day trip to Canada at the end of his September tour of the United States to visit an Indian settlement, the Vatican announced Friday. During his September, 1984, visit to Canada, thick fog prevented the Pope from flying to the Ft. Simpson settlement to meet Indians in Canada's far north. But John Paul promised the Indians he would make the trip during his next North American tour. The Pope's second visit to the United States is scheduled for Sept.

The Nisga'a Indian tribe signed a treaty that gives members self-government and land rights in their rugged mountain homeland in British Columbia province. It was a historic day not only for the 5,500 Nisga'a but for all Indians in British Columbia. None of the other 50 Indian communities has obtained a treaty in this century, and the settlement is expected to serve as a loose model for other deals.

Canadian soldiers Sunday quietly seized control of the last fortified Mohawk barricade in Quebec, but officials said restoring order after the seven-week armed standoff may take some time. Troops in armored personnel carriers and backed by helicopters took control of an Indian barricade in Oka, a town about 20 miles west of Montreal, but approximately 30 armed Mohawks calling themselves Warriors refused to lay down their arms. "Nobody's giving up nothing," a Warrior angrily told reporters.

Canadian army troops and masked Mohawks jointly dismantled barricades at a key commuter bridge into Montreal on Wednesday, taking a major and unexpected step toward resolving an armed standoff that has preoccupied this country for seven weeks. The sudden army-Indian cooperation came just as the army was scheduled to demolish the barricades by itself, using armored personnel carriers fitted with bulldozer blades.

Long-simmering tensions between Canadian police and militant Indians flared into violence when Ontario riot-squad officers fatally shot a native man who was among about 40 protesters occupying a public park on the shores of Lake Huron, authorities said Thursday. Two other protesters were critically wounded in the Wednesday night incident at Ipperwash Provincial Park, about 155 miles southwest of Toronto.

When Doreen Cross, a 34-year-old Mohawk, was growing up in this once-quiet Quebec village, she used to hear again and again that the white man had stolen vast tracts of land from the Indians. "They've taken all kinds of rights away from us," she asserted. Today, armed Indians in Oka have taken a stand against the whites to reclaim a small part of that land, but Cross finds herself with mixed feelings about that.

This is the northern frontier of the Cree Indian nation in Quebec; no roads lead here. Today, most people arrive on the Canadian Airlines and Air Inuit flights that land on the adjacent airstrip six days a week, as long as the weather holds. But for centuries, the main transportation route into this sandy wedge of land on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay was the Great Whale River.

When he was growing up here in the Canadian Arctic, Malachi Arreak hunted seals and caribou on what he considered to be "his" land--the vast, treeless tundra where his forebears have managed to hold out against fantastic odds for thousands of years. From time to time, he would bump into a prospector, always a white. "I'd say, 'Hey! That ain't no Eskimo,' " says Arreak, himself an Inuk, or one of the Inuit, as Canada's Eskimos prefer to be called. Arreak didn't enjoy these encounters.

The Canadian government extended a hand Wednesday in apology for more than a century of mistreatment of aboriginal peoples--but the gesture was rebuffed by some as not going far enough. A "statement of reconciliation" was the centerpiece of Ottawa's response to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. It was accompanied by a pledge of $420 million for native peoples over the next four years on top of current funding.

Canada's Supreme Court issued a landmark decision Thursday establishing the principle that native Indian rights to resource-rich land were not invalidated by European settlement. The case involves claims to 22,400 square miles of the West Coast province of British Columbia--an area almost three times the size of Massachusetts--but has implications for almost all of British Columbia and other parts of Canada.

Labrador's 5,000 Inuits will take control of 5% of the region as part of a deal that also gives them a chunk of the mineral resources in that portion of the province of Newfoundland. Under the deal with the provincial government, the Inuits will be given direct ownership of about 6,000 square miles of Labrador. They will also receive 25% of Newfoundland's revenues from mining, oil and gas production.

A medicine man helped end a monthlong armed standoff between Indian rebels and police in British Columbia. The last 12 holdouts at the Gustafsen Lake encampment in central British Columbia were in jail and expected to face trespassing charges after surrendering to police Sunday. Meanwhile, Chippewas in Grand Bend, Ontario, said they will continue to occupy a provincial park there.

As thick black smoke hung in the air from burning barricades, Canadian Indian chiefs began negotiations Friday to ease tension between police and Indians after a Wednesday clash left one protester dead and two others injured. "We will continue to work on this and work on a resolution to de-escalate this matter," Tom Bressette, a chief of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, said of the standoff that began when militant Indians seized the Ipperwash Provincial Park on Monday.

Long-simmering tensions between Canadian police and militant Indians flared into violence when Ontario riot-squad officers fatally shot a native man who was among about 40 protesters occupying a public park on the shores of Lake Huron, authorities said Thursday. Two other protesters were critically wounded in the Wednesday night incident at Ipperwash Provincial Park, about 155 miles southwest of Toronto.

If there was ever a showcase of teetotaling, it is this Indian village of 486, set in the piney hills of south-central British Columbia. If there was ever a lesson to be learned about the ancient, everlasting snares and delusions of strong waters, the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters of Alkali Lake are the ones to teach it.

As thick black smoke hung in the air from burning barricades, Canadian Indian chiefs began negotiations Friday to ease tension between police and Indians after a Wednesday clash left one protester dead and two others injured. "We will continue to work on this and work on a resolution to de-escalate this matter," Tom Bressette, a chief of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, said of the standoff that began when militant Indians seized the Ipperwash Provincial Park on Monday.

In the latest in a series of summer confrontations between native activists and authorities across Canada, about 100 Indians occupied a military base on Lake Huron on Monday after forcing military police to vacate the facility.

Four days before the vote on the 2002 Winter Games, Quebec played a trump card Monday by announcing it had received the backing of the province's native groups. In an attempt to upstage North American rival and favorite Salt Lake City, the Quebec bidding committee called a news conference to present the grand chief of the Huron-Wendat Nation, Max One Onti Gros-Louis.